Method and system to provide fine granular integrity to digital data

Abstract

A method and system to generate fine granular integrity to huge volumes of data in real time at a very low computational cost. The invention proposes a scalable system that can receive different digital data from multiple sources and generates integrity streams associated to the original data. This invention provides full guarantees for data integrity; the order of data logged cannot be altered and content cannot be modified added or deleted without detection.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates to digital data integrity and more particularly to a technique to detect malicious tampering at a very fine granular level without the performance constraints of purely using digital signatures.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Today, almost all critical business records are generated, managed and stored electronically, creating efficiencies and cost-savings for businesses. Unfortunately, digital information can be easily deleted, altered and / or manipulated. For businesses, the burden of proof is on the company to ensure and attest to the accuracy and credibility of their electronic business records. This ability to prove the integrity of critical business records becomes especially important in litigation where executives are often called upon to support their claims of ownership of any discoverable records, as well as verify their history of creation and use.[0003]It is important to remark the difference between involuntary ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0021]With the proposed invention is possible to generate fine granular integrity to huge volumes of data in real time at a very low computational cost.

Problems solved by technology

Unfortunately, digital information can be easily deleted, altered and / or manipulated.

The industry has been addressing these deficiencies by several means, including the use of WORMs (Write Once Read Many) devices, the use of digital signatures, redundant off-site storage managed by different people, etc., but all of them have aspects to demand a more efficient solution: WORMs are slower than any other storage device and one risk is that a drive can be replaced by another one tampered; digital signatures have a high computational cost that makes impossible to use standalone in systems with significant transaction volume and do not prevent the change of order; and duplicating the storage systems and administration have cost issues and difficult the further audit process.

The state of the art is based today in the use of digital signatures (Public Key Infrastructure based) accompanied by an accurate date and time stamp to provide authenticity to the data susceptible of further audit but the following issues are not addressed:a) When processing a huge volume of data, the performance required is not cost efficient or even it is directly not possible to implement because lack of performance of digital signatures.b) Digital signatures and timestamps do not provide by themselves the guarantee that there have not been registers deleted without notice, which in fact means immutability is not a feature of such log registries.

There is a patent that proposes a primitive solution by using a cumulative hash function (U.S. Pat. No. 6,640,294) but it does not address the problem of malicious tampering because it is possible to recalculate the entire set of hashes to match the modified data values (it is clear when saying “[ .

Timestamps are also included.Provides authenticity, so it is not possible to impersonate the source of data.It's not oriented to data storage but to integrity generation.

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